Whanaungatanga, better together - Trustpower Case Study

Trustpower’s history dates back to Tauranga’s first power station in 1915. Since then it has grown into one of New Zealand’s largest energy and telecommunications companies, developing irrigation schemes and extending ultra-fast broadband internet services.

To better support the increasing diversity of customer requirements, Trustpower’s search for emerging CX technology solutions began in September 2019.

COVID-19 rapidly shifted the business priority to establish a service that could quickly support working from home.

Ten days after project kickoff, the transition to Amazon Connect, an omnichannel cloud contact center, commenced and working from home agents started taking calls.

While the primary objective had been met with the establishment of the cloud contact center, new challenges emerged in optimising the performance of this new environment.

While bedding in the service early issues were reported by Agents manually, using a form that took 15 minutes to complete. The Service desk took a further 20 minutes to take the data, match to logs and try to identify the root cause.

Agents were happy manually capturing issues at first, but this reduced over time through ‘reporting fatigue’

Trustpower acted proactively to tune the services with insights provided by Operata.

Statistical metrics demonstrated a clear increase in performance after Trustpower moved to AWS Direct Connect.

Trustpower business and technology leaders now have the data required to be confident in the technology, which has, as a result, been selected for their contact center platform of choice.

"I just love the collaborative approach with Operata. It strengthens my confidence that we are partnering with the right people. "

— Andrea Leggatt - Technology Operations Manager, Trustpower

Trustpower Goals

• Quickly gain insights into the root cause of contact center performance issues, without disruption to agents.
• Measure the success of issue resolution, providing facts and figures to business stakeholders on progress.
• Build support for and maintain stakeholder confidence in the Amazon Connect service.

How Operata Helped

Trustpower selected Operata’s Transform package from Amazon Marketplace.

Operata’s expert services worked with the Trustpower team to integrate Operata within their Salesforce and Amazon Connect environment. Within days, the data gathering process commenced.

"In moving to Amazon Connect, and Agents working from home, Trustpower needed real-time visibility of quality and issues. In hindsight, we should have put Operata in sooner."

— Rachel Southon - Project Manager, Technology & Delivery, Trustpower

All manual data capture processes were scrapped! From that point forward, Amazon Connect events, data network performance measures, agent activity, and softphone errors were all passed into the Operata platform. The data was synchronized to provide the insights and understanding Trustpower needed to achieve their business goals.

Troubleshooting time was reduced from 20 to 2 minutes, with insights that targeted actual fixes.

"With what came to light through this journey, in implementing a cloud telephony platform. Operata should have been a given for us to implement"

What changes were made and what was the outcome?

This new information brought certainty to the value in moving softphone connectivity away from trans-tasman public internet to an AWS Direct Connect.

Lower level issues were identified as relating to working from home Agent’s internet performance. Where the performance could not be improved, the agents were targeted to move back to Trustpower’s offices once restrictions were lifted.

"Operata was critical in giving us the confidence to migrate our entire organization to Amazon Connect"  

Continuous data capture helped the team determine whether agent issues were technical or could be resolved with training.  It enabled conversations to move from anecdotal feedback to verified issues with targeted actions to resolve.

As the team provided hard evidence of improvement, fact replaced perception and confidence in Amazon Connect reached a new high.

What next?

Trustpower has made the decision to commit to the Amazon Connect service for all their agents, even as they move back to corporate offices.

"Operata made the decision easier to transition all of Trustpower to Amazon Connect. It helped correct perceived issues and provided the data to ‘fix’ the reputational risks associated with bedding in a new platform."

Highlights

• Trustpower needed a solution to automatically collect performance data due to their quick shift toward working from home agents.
• The road to recovery started with Transform, a structured process to collect data within days and provide the insights needed to add
  value quickly.
• Operata software collectors easily embedded into a Salesforce/Connect integrated environment.
• Operata identified the need and proved the value in uplifting network connectivity and agent training.
• Trustpower quickly iterated with Amazon Connect, and capitalised on the data being captured, allowing Trustpower to generate deep insights into how both the service was being used, and equally where further enhanced customer value could be delivered for Trustpower customers.
• Jabra headset integration was piloted and is now moving into production.

Download this Operata Trustpower case study as a PDF.